Now, there are a lot of bumper stickers out there, funny, political, all kinds, and I enjoy looking at them when I’m driving. Every once in a while, I see once that makes me think, or gives me a good laugh, but a few years ago, I saw one that has taken up more of my personal processing time than any other. Because I have absolutely no idea what it could possibly mean. Actually, I had come to the conclusion that I must have read it wrong or made the whole thing up, at least until I saw the same bumper sticker just last week.

The bumper sticker: “Just because I’m an atheist doesn’t mean I don’t believe in God.”

I delight in the full moon every month. And while, despite the large number of objects I own in a wolf motif, I have never literally howled at the moon, I do feel a surge of something when I notice a full moon in the sky. It’s primal.

I don’t consider myself a superstitious man (a whimsical one, surely, but that’s different), but it often seems that I am more better at what I do when the moon is bright. It could be a coincidence, it could be my imagination, it could be placebo effect. Or maybe some part of my mind is on a 28-day cycle of highs and lows, just as I know I am a faster reader in the evening and a faster typist in the morning. It doesn’t seem so hard to believe that there is a cycle at play. And if I know anything about how my mind works and where my creativity comes from, it is that I know very little about how my mind works or where my creativity comes from. So who am I to say?

As I see it, my duty is to to be as open as possible to inspiration and new ideas, and to make my mind a welcome place for sparks of ideas to start a fire, not to try to predict or understand the whimsy of the Muse.

Do I actually believe that there is a Muse for my mathematical ideas? Sometimes I do. The inimitable Ramanujan said that his astonishing (and astonishing really is an understatement) insights and formulas were revealed to him by a goddess in visions. If you know anything about Ramanujan, it’s as plausible a story as any.

In any case, the last three days have been good for my work; I’ve figured out how to confirm some of my hunches, and taken a chunk out of the next batch of questions I want to answer about number theory. It’s becoming clearer in my mind how the transition from my current whiteboard and Mathematica explorations into a handful of publishable papers is going to happen.

What I haven’t done much lately is update this blog. As the full moon winds down, it’s a good time to play a little bit of catch-up and vignette my way to a new blog post.